Inventing the New Negro by Daphne Lamothe

Inventing the New Negro by Daphne Lamothe

It is no coincidence, Daphne Lamothe writes, that so many black writers and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century either trained formally as ethnographers or worked as amateur collectors of folklore and folk culture. In Inventing the New Negro Lamothe explores the process by which key figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown adapted ethnography and folklore in their narratives to create a cohesive, collective, and modern black identity. Lamothe explores how these figures assumed the roles of self-reflective translators and explicators of African American and African diasporic cultures to Western, largely white audiences. Lamothe argues that New Negro writers ultimately shifted the presuppositions of both literary modernism and modernist anthropology by making their narratives as much about ways of understanding as they were about any quest for objective knowledge. In critiquing the ethnographic framework within which they worked, they confronted the classist, racist, and cultural biases of the dominant society and challenged their readers to imagine a different set of relations between the powerful and the oppressed. Inventing the New Negro combines an intellectual history of one of the most important eras of African American letters with nuanced and original readings of seminal works of literature. It will be of interest not only to Harlem Renaissance scholars but to anyone who is interested in the intersections of culture, literature, folklore, and ethnography.

"Daphne Lamothe has brought together history of science, literary criticism, and the analysis of a seasoned scholar of the New Negro movement in a way that simply has never been done beforeInventing the New Negro will start new conversations and develop new lines of inquiry. It is a brave and thoughtful book."-Lee D. Baker, Duke University

Daphne Lamothe teaches Afro-American studies at Smith College.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780812240931
ISBN 10	0812240936
Title	Inventing the New Negro
Author	Daphne Lamothe
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	University of Pennsylvania Press
Year published	2008-07-25
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.